


Who Sins Drunk

by ophelia_interrupted



Series: One New Orleans Summer [1]
Category: Benjamin January Mysteries - Barbara Hambly
Genre: Caning, Consensual, Corporal Punishment, Discipline, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, References to Addiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 21:42:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7239598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophelia_interrupted/pseuds/ophelia_interrupted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal asks the Januarys for discipline to help him overcome his addiction to alcohol.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who Sins Drunk

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to my beta, Brigidh! You've helped improve the story a great deal.

            Ben looked across the breakfast table at Hannibal, and felt somewhere between exasperated and helpless.  Hannibal had a black eye and a swollen lip, and as Ben knew from helping the other man undress and bathe the previous night, his body was covered in purpling bruises.  Hannibal’s dark eyes met Ben’s own, and he gestured with the sweet biscuit he was toying with but obviously not eating.  “What else could I have expected from wandering out while I was that drunk?  At least they didn’t steal my violin this time.  I always have a hell of a time figuring out where they’ve thrown it after they realize that none of the pawnshops in the city will take it anymore.” 

            “You’re lucky they didn’t crack your skull for you,” said Rose, as she set a cup of coffee down next to Hannibal’s plate.  She sat down beside Ben, and looked at their friend with concern. 

            He met her gaze, then Ben’s, and then looked away.  Usually he recounted his misadventures with blithe, self-deprecating humor, but this time it was clear that something was preying on his mind.  “You’re right, of course,” he said after a moment.  “And you were very good to take me in, despite the state I was in.  I might have drowned face-down in a gutter if you hadn’t.”  He drew breath as if to say something else, and then fell awkwardly silent.  Rose reached out and took his hand, and he glanced up and smiled ruefully at her. 

            A strand of his long brown hair had come loose from its queue, and Ben tenderly tucked it behind his ear for him.  Rose had been far from displeased when Ben had told her that he and Hannibal had been lovers before their marriage.  To the contrary—it had been her idea to bring the loyal, gentle--if somewhat hapless--fiddle player into their bed.  It was not an arrangement that could be kept all the time—several months out of the year Rose ran her school out of the Januarys’ house, and no mother would send her daughter to such a place if it were known that the schoolmistress was sleeping with two men—especially if one of them had Hannibal’s degenerate reputation.  But during the summer, when every family who could afford it left New Orleans for the relative cool of the lake, Hannibal could stay with them without scandal. 

            Hannibal caught the hand that Ben had smoothed his hair back with and deftly turned it so that he pressed the big, dark knuckles to his lips.  He shut his eyes as he did so, looking for a moment as if he were lost in the sensation of the touch. 

            “What is it?” Rose asked, when Hannibal released Ben’s hand but still kept his eyes closed.  The fiddle player released a long, slow sigh, and then met her gaze.

            “I need your help,” he said finally. 

            “With what?” Ben asked. 

            “ _I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking._   Alcohol is ruining me, _amicus meus_ ,” he said.  “What good is it to have my consumption in abeyance if I drink myself to death, or get beaten to death while wandering around at night drunk?”

            Ben looked at Rose.  They had asked each other much the same question, but there seemed to be little that could be done.  Hannibal was an adult, and he was going to do what it seemed best to him to do. 

            “I’ve been trying to cut down,” Hannibal continued, “but you can see how well that’s worked.  I need you to give me a reason to stay sober.  I need . . . ” He seemed to balk at saying any more, looking away into a corner of the room. 

            “What?” coaxed Rose, pressing his hand. 

            When he turned back to them there was bitter self-recrimination in his eyes.  “I need you to do for me what Philippa used to do for me, and Consuela as well.  If you find out I’ve gotten drunk, from today forward, I want you to take up that cane in the schoolroom and thrash me.”

            Ben wasn’t sure if he was joking or not.  “What?” he asked, ready to believe that this was some unusually-obscure Classical allusion that had gone over his head. 

            “I’m quite serious,” Hannibal said.  “In this matter, imagine I’m a young boy in your care who you need to break of a very bad habit.  Lord knows that I have about as much self-control as a fourteen-year-old.” 

            “I don’t think I could bring myself to cane you,” Rose said, looking quite distressed at the thought.

            “Not even to save my life?” Hannibal asked her. 

            Rose turned to look at Ben, wordlessly asking him what he thought they should do.  In moments of frustration Ben had occasionally threatened to do things to Hannibal—most of them quite a bit more fatal than caning—but he balked at the idea of actually causing him pain.  “Beating you won’t solve anything,” he said gently.  He knew Hannibal was ashamed of his drinking and the messes it landed him in, but it made him sad to think that the fiddler believed himself to be a creature so base that he ought to be hit. 

            “It doesn’t solve anything, no, but it does cut down on the number of times I get so drunk that I’m an easy target for bravos in the street.”

            “Hangovers don’t do that?  You get some pretty punishing headaches sometimes,” Ben said.

            “You can ease a hangover by starting to drink again—which is what I inevitably do.  There’s nothing you can do about a good set of cane stripes except grit your teeth and wait for them to go away.”

            Ben could see his point, but still couldn’t imagine himself actually raising a hand to his friend.  If nothing else, he was a big man, and Hannibal was not.  The thought of striking him seemed terribly unfair and rather cruel.  “We can think of some other consequence for you, if you need one.  Maybe if you come home drunk, you have to sleep on the couch.”

            “You’d exile me?”  Hannibal looked hurt.  “I really would rather be whipped, if it’s all the same to you.”

            “You say physical punishment has helped you in the past?” Rose asked.  She sounded as if she were actually considering acceding to Hannibal’s request, and Ben looked at her, faintly appalled. 

            “It has.  You wouldn’t actually have to use it that often.  I’m only a tosspot—I’m not actually a masochist.  Remind me once a month or so what the wages of sin are, and you’ll find me in far fewer gutters.”

            “Wouldn’t you come to resent us?” Ben asked.  He’d had more than his share of beatings as a boy, and as far as he could tell, it had accomplished nothing but instilling in him a slow-burning rage at the people who’d held the rod.  He’d never forgotten how Simon Fourchet had flogged him with a broom handle when he was a child, and part of him still hated the man for it. 

            Hannibal tilted his head a little to one side, as if it had suddenly occurred to him that he and Ben were misunderstanding one another.  “I’m not asking you to hurt me.  I’m asking you to protect me,” he said.  “You’ve shielded me from harm so many times . . . now I’m asking you to shield me from myself.  I don’t see how I could resent that.”

            Ben found that perspective counter-intuitive, but then it was true Hannibal had never been a slave.  He would be entering this agreement of his own free will, knowing he could get out of it if he wanted to.  Perhaps that made it all very different.  Even still, he couldn’t quite find it in himself to agree to cane his friend.  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

            Hannibal inclined his head.  “An entirely fair response.  Thank you for considering what I’ve asked.”

            In truth, Ben hoped that Hannibal would just forget about the whole thing.  For a time, the fiddler did well on his own, coming home sober at night, or at least mostly so.  Then one night he didn’t come home at all.

            Rose and Ben uneasily went to bed without him, but when Ben woke up a little before dawn and Hannibal still wasn’t in, he knew something was very wrong.  He kissed Rose awake and said, “I’m going to look for him.”

             “Be careful,” she said.  After dark, one didn’t have to be drunk to run into danger on the streets of New Orleans. 

            Ben was hurriedly getting dressed when a knock came on the door to Ben’s study.  He answered it in his shirtsleeves, and found Lieutenant Shaw standing outside, with a bedraggled and apparently-unconscious Hannibal slung over his shoulders.  “I think maybe this belongs to you,” Shaw said wryly. 

             “Oh, God . . . get him inside.  Sir.”  Ben stood out of the doorway and let Shaw carry Hannibal in.  He laid the fiddler down on the couch, and when Rose smoothed Hannibal’s wet and muddied hair out of his face, it became apparent that he’d been beaten again.  The whole left side of his jaw was a swollen, purpling bruise, and he had a bleeding cut on his forehead. 

             “What happened?” Ben asked.

             “Riot in The Turkey Buzzard.  Or so I surmise, nobody having seen ‘nothing about nothing.’”  The policeman shook his head.  “Sefton here was lucky.  There was one man lyin’ in there dead, with a Bowie knife through the eye.”

            Ben checked Hannibal’s pulse, his breathing.  They seemed normal enough, for all that he was out cold.  He started undressing his friend, surprised, as he always was, at how thin the pale body was under his clothes.  Anger began to swell in him as he spotted bruises on Hannibal’s torso.  The fiddler was one of the most harmless men he had ever met, and when he was drunk, he was vulnerable.  “Do you know who did this?” he asked Shaw.

             “The witnesses who ‘didn’t see anything’ were unable to say,” he remarked dryly.  “Miss Kate the Gouger told me it would be ‘taken care of,’ though.”

             “Well, that’s a comfort,” Rose said acerbically. 

            Ben gave her instructions on making an astringent tea to bathe Hannibal’s wounds, and she went to find his medical satchel.  “Thank you for bringing him here,” he told Shaw. 

             “I couldn’t very well leave him there, lyin’ in the mud.  And this is the closest thing to a fixed address he’s got.  He going to be all right?” Shaw looked over at Ben.

             “I think so, although he’s going to feel terrible in the morning.  Or later this morning,” Ben said, realizing that the birds had begun to chirp outside.

            Once Shaw was gone, Ben sat in a chair and watched his battered friend sleep.  Rose came up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, gently kneading his anxiety-stiffened muscles.  “Is this our fault?” Ben asked at last.  “Should we have agreed to punish him for drunkenness when he asked?”

             “It’s the fault of whoever beat him,” Rose said.  “You had no way of knowing that this would happen.”

             “Yes, I did,” Ben said unhappily.  “The Swamp is no place for helpless people, and he drinks to the point of helplessness.  He’s been doing well at giving up alcohol, but not well enough.  He’s right that he’s going to get himself killed one day.”

             “Are you re-thinking your response to his request for canings?” Rose asked.

             “I don’t know.”  Ben rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.  “Everything in me tells me that violence isn’t the answer, but we’ve got to do something.”

             “I don’t think he’s asked us for violence,” Rose said.  “Just discipline.  It sounded to me like he knew himself and knew what worked for him.” 

             “I just . . . I can’t forget what Fourchet used to do to me.  I don’t want to be him.  Or anything like him.”

             “You’re not going to turn into Fourchet,” Rose reassured him.  “For one thing, you’re not Hannibal’s master, you’re his friend.  For another, Hannibal’s not a child, and he’s openly asking us for this help.”  When Ben was silent for some time, she asked, “Would you prefer it if I were the one to punish him?”

             “Yes, because then I could go in the other room and pretend it wasn’t happening.  But that’s dishonest.”  After a long silence in which he considered his options, he said, “I suppose we can try this.  We’ll ask him who he’d rather have do it.”

            Several hours later, when Hannibal was at least moderately functional, Ben brought him a cup of coffee and sat next to him at the table.  The fiddler was in a borrowed nightshirt and was wrapped in a blanket, as his muddied clothes needed to go in the wash.  “Rose and I want to talk to you.”

            Hannibal looked up at him, appearing spooked, and it occurred to Ben that the man was afraid of being rejected because of his alcohol problem.  Others had done it to him before.  “We’re not throwing you out,” Ben said, putting his hand on the fiddler’s shoulder.  Hannibal visibly relaxed.  “We’ve been talking about what you asked us the other week . . . about having us punish you for drunkenness.”

             “And?” Hannibal asked.  He looked nervous, as well he might.  Canings were nasty. 

             “If you think it will help you, we’ll do it—on one condition.  If you come home banged up like you were last night, I’m not beating you again on top of it.  You can accept your bruises as punishment instead.”

             “Agreed,” Hannibal said, his dark eyes watchful, clearly having both hopes and fears about what Ben would say next. 

             “Other than that . . . every time we find out you’ve gotten drunk from here on out, you can expect a whipping.”

            Hannibal’s face was a curious study of anxiety and relief.  “ _I can no other answer make but thanks, and thanks; and ever thanks_.  I need someone to look after me, and I’d rather it was you two.  The ladies of Perdidio Street and the Guards do what they can, but I still seem to keep ending up in the gutters.”

            “Do you have a preference as to whether it’s Rose or me who canes you?”

            “Either would work, but if I’m allowed a preference, _amicus meus,_ I’d choose you.  No offense meant to the fair Rose.  You’ve kept me from harm for years now, and I deeply admire your commitment to just causes.  I think you’ll be strict with me, but fair, and that’s all I can ask for.”

            Ben had been worried that he’d say something like that.  “Very well,” he said, wondering if he’d regret this.  “You can consider yourself on notice.”

            Hannibal gave him a jaunty two-fingered salute, but his eyes were perfectly serious.  “ _A faithful friend is a strong defense: and he that hath found such an one hath found a treasure_.”

            “I hope you still feel that way when I eventually have to punish you,” Ben said. 

            Hannibal held out for over a month, although he had a couple of close calls.  Ben and Rose had tentatively set his limit at two drinks, and he came perilously close to having a third on two occasions.  Both times, Ben had given him a steady look and said quietly, “Do you really want to do that, Hannibal?”  Hannibal had looked startled, then alarmed, and had allowed that actually, now that he thought about it, he didn’t.  He had followed that up with profuse thanks the next morning, for Ben’s having kept him on the path to sobriety.  On the whole, the arrangement seemed to be going very well, and Ben hadn’t actually had to give Hannibal a single lick. 

            Then, inevitably, there came another night when Hannibal didn’t come home.  Ben woke up an hour or two before dawn, and the fiddler’s spot in the bed was still empty.  Worry began to eat at him, and he knew he wouldn’t be getting back to sleep.  He took his leave of a concerned Rose and made his uneasy way down to the Swamp, taking a back route through the ciprière, until he heard the bright skirl of violin music.  Hannibal—it could only be Hannibal—was tripping his way through a Mozart contradance, elaborating on the melody with skill like an intoxicated angel’s.  Nobody applauded when the music spun to a close—instead there was a loud crash, and the sound of men cursing.

            _What has he gotten himself into this time?_ Ben wondered wearily.  He waited at the rear of a tent that made do as a bar until Hannibal ducked through a flap and stood unsteadily in the moonlight.  He was fumbling with his violin case, trying to put the instrument away, when another crash sounded in the bar, and he flinched. 

            Ben went up to him and wordlessly held the case still, so Hannibal could wind his violin in its wrappings of tattered silk and put it away.  “Ah, thank you, Benjamin,” he said brightly.  “You showed up just in time.”

            “You’re in trouble, Hannibal,” Ben said quietly.  Relieved as he was to find his friend in one piece, he felt grim about what he was going to have to do next.  _Why couldn’t Hannibal have picked some other way to be punished?_ he wondered. 

            Hannibal looked up at him with dread in his eyes, but no real surprise.  “I didn’t start out intending to come down here,” he said.  “All I meant to do was . . .” He gestured loose-jointedly in the air.

            “Have one or two drinks,” Ben finished for him.

            “Yes,” Hannibal said wretchedly.

            “But this time you couldn’t stop.”

            “No.”  The fiddler couldn’t meet Ben’s gaze, clearly ashamed.

            “Well, come home and get some rest,” Ben said, taking his friend’s arm.  “We’ll talk about consequences tomorrow.”

            “ _Qui peccat ebrius, luat sobrius_ ,” Hannibal said with a sigh, and followed him. 

            They managed to make it back to the Januarys’ house without incident, Ben holding Hannibal’s arm to steady him and keep him from tumbling into the gutters.  Dawn was breaking by the time they were home, and Rose was getting up.  She helped Ben undress Hannibal and put him to bed. 

            It was evening before he was well enough to get up.  He was dressed and more or less presentable when he walked out into the dining area, where Ben and Rose were just finishing supper.  “We saved some for you,” Rose said, pushing a plate toward him.

            “Thank you,” Hannibal said gravely, “but I think I’ll decline.  I never could eat when I knew I had a whipping coming.  I’ve been dreading it all day.”

            Ben nodded, understanding.  “Let’s get this over with then, so you can have some peace of mind,” he said. 

            Hannibal looked at him, and for a moment he thought that the fiddler was going to give some reason why they should delay, but instead he looked away and said, “Of course.  You’re absolutely right.”  Hannibal was not particularly known for his courage, and his quiet acceptance of coming suffering touched Ben’s heart.  He was being quite brave, for Hannibal.  He clapped the fiddler sympathetically on the shoulder and led him toward the schoolroom.  The three of them had talked during the last month about what punishment for Hannibal would look like, and Rose had given Ben lessons in how to use the cane correctly.  He felt about as ready to put those lessons into practice as he was going to.  _I’m not torturing him, I’m helping him,_ he reminded himself.  If only he didn’t already feel guilty. 

            Hannibal trailed the Januarys into the schoolroom, looking as miserable as Ben had ever seen him.  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, as they stopped before Rose’s desk.  “This whole fiasco was entirely my fault, and I regret that it ended up involving you.  Thank you for coming to get me, Ben.  I probably would have gotten my teeth knocked out in that bar fight if you hadn’t.”

            Ben rested his hand on Hannibal’s bony back and said, “It’s all right.  You’re worth it.”  Hannibal was a dear, sweet fellow, loyal and caring as a friend could be.  And if he wasn’t exactly a brave man, he’d at least scraped up every fragment of his small courage to help Ben and Rose on many occasions, sometimes at quite a bit of risk to himself. 

            Hannibal looked up, as if startled that Ben would say such a thing, and said, “Thank you,” again, very softly.  Then he turned away, saying, “I suppose I’ll just get myself ready then, shall I?” 

            To Ben’s surprise, Hannibal started by taking off his boots, and then proceeded to undress until he wore nothing but his shirt, a threadbare white linen garment that hung down to his mid-thighs.  It was a not-uncommon practice to whip boys in just their shirts, and Ben wondered if Hannibal had been punished that way as a child.  The thought saddened him—it was too easy to imagine a dark-haired, skinny boy, all knees and elbows, shivering a bit in his shirtsleeves, waiting to be hit.  He really hoped Hannibal knew what he was asking for. 

            “Bend over the desk, Hannibal,” Ben said gently, tapping Rose’s desk with his finger. 

            “ _Morituri te salutant,_ ” Hannibal quoted resignedly, and took up a position that he had to have learned in school.  Instead of bending over and resting his elbows on the desktop, he bent forward until his cheek rested against the wood, his arms stretched out in front of him.  His eyes looked frightened and very sad. 

            Once Hannibal was in place, Ben took the cane down from where it hung on the wall.  It was a girls’ cane, lighter and whippier than one used for boys, but Ben didn’t doubt that it would still hurt like the devil.  Rose sat down in the desk’s chair and gently took Hannibal’s hands in her own. 

            “It’ll be all right,” she said softly.  Hannibal shut his eyes for a moment, and nodded. 

            Ben lifted the hem of the fiddler’s shirt up and folded it over his back, exposing his narrow backside.  Then Ben positioned himself as Rose had taught him to, beside and slightly ahead of his target.  He rested the cane against Hannibal’s behind, and Hannibal’s entire body tensed.  “Do you understand why you’re being punished?” he asked.  Hannibal nodded.  “Why?” Ben pressed.

            “Because I have no excuse for getting drunk.  Not when I know it’ll eventually kill me,” Hannibal said quietly.

            “That’s right.  I want you to think about that while you’re being corrected,” Ben said.  He was trying very hard to be strict but fair.

            Hannibal half-whispered something—Ben thought it was “Yes, sir.”  Hannibal’s meekness was like another little half-twist of a knife in his heart. 

            “You don’t have to call me that,” Ben said.  Under these circumstances, he didn’t want to be a “sir.”  To his mind, there was nothing crueler or more bitter than having to address the man who was beating you as “sir.”

            It took all the willpower Ben had to raise the cane.  _Remember you’re saving his life,_ he told himself.  _Make this thorough enough, and maybe you won’t have to do it again._ That thought give him the determination he needed to bring the rod down in a clean stroke that ended with a _crack_ against Hannibal’s skin.  The fiddler gasped, and his hands closed convulsively around Rose’s. 

            Grimly, his heart hurting inside him, Ben laid on the stripes close together, but without crossing, as Rose had taught him to do.  Soon there was a row of reddening bars from just beneath the place where the cleft of Hannibal’s bottom started, running down to the tops of his thighs.  Then Ben went back to the top and started again.  Hannibal gave a little cry of anguish when he realized he was going to get a second going-over, but he held steady and was otherwise quiet.  By the third time Ben was lashing his way down Hannibal’s backside, the fiddler was having a terrible time holding still, unable to keep his body from jerking away from the cane as it fell, and earning some stripes on his hip for his trouble. 

            “Steady, Hannibal,” Ben said, as he cracked him across the backs of his thighs again.  Ben could feel his own pulse in his ears, not so much from the physical exertion, but from the emotional toll it took on him to do this.

            “Ben, please!” Hannibal begged, sensing that he intended to go back to the tops of his cheeks and start again. 

            “I think he’s had enough,” said Rose.  Her spectacles flashed in the dying light as she looked up at him.  Ben could tell by the tense cast of her shoulders that this hurt her, too.

            Ben wasn’t so sure that stopping the moment Hannibal started to beg sent the right message, since the whole point of the punishment was to make him extremely unwilling to repeat his mistake.  The more unwilling he was, the less often Ben would have to do this.  But he trusted Rose’s judgment, and so he lowered the cane without striking.  Instead, he ran his hand very gently over the hot, welted skin of Hannibal’s bottom, hoping to put out the worst of the fire.  He could feel the other man trembling.  “All right,” he said.  “It’s over, Hannibal.  You can get up.”

            Slowly, stiffly, Hannibal pushed himself up on the heels of his hands, and then to Ben’s surprise, broke down and started to cry. 

            “Ohh, don’t, it’s all over now,” Rose soothed.  Hannibal stood awkwardly and went to her, kneeling in front of her chair and folding his arms across her knees.  He bowed his forehead to the crook of one elbow and wept like a soul in Purgatory—all shame and bitter remorse. 

            Ben wiped away sweat on his forehead, feeling as weak and wrung out as if he’d been in a physical fight.  For a moment, he worked on collecting himself.  The punishment was over, and it hadn’t killed any of them.  Ben hadn’t turned into a rage-filled alcoholic.  Hannibal was not a battered slave child.  True, the fiddler was crying, but he didn’t have any broken bones and didn’t need stitches.  If his resolve to stay away from alcohol had been strengthened, and he could avoid feeling resentment toward the Januarys, the whole thing might have been worth it. 

            “Comfort him, Ben,” Rose urged, breaking in on his reverie.  “You’re the one who punished him—you need to show him he’s forgiven.”

            Ben got down on his knees beside Hannibal and coaxed the weeping fiddler into his arms.  “Rose forgives you and so do I,” he said, stroking Hannibal’s hair with his fingertips.  Imagining what must be going through his mind to make him cry so, Ben assured him, “Nobody’s angry at you.  Nobody thinks any the worse of you.  In fact, it was very brave of you to ask for help with your drinking, and you accepted the consequences of your actions with grace.  I’m proud of you, Hannibal.  I really am.”

            That actually made Hannibal cry harder for a while, but he eventually quieted.  As he wiped his eyes on his sleeves, he said, “That . . . was easily the worst thrashing of my adult life.  Forgive me—I don’t usually cry this way.”

            Rose smoothed his mussed hair out of his face and said, “It’s all right.  You’ve just had a very upsetting experience.”

            “Well, yes . . . but I think at least half the tears were relieved ones.  Now that I know what you’ll do if I turn up drunk again, I feel like I have something solid at my back.  You’re not going to stand by and watch me kill myself, and I’m so grateful.” 

            “You’re welcome,” Ben said, and found he meant it.  “I hated doing that to you . . . I think . . . I think I was worried I’d turn into Simon Fourchet.  But I haven’t.  I’m all right, and you’re all right.”

            “Quite so,” Hannibal said, flashing him a slightly-tearful smile.  “Very sore, but fine.”  He embraced Ben again for a moment, pressing him tightly in his arms.  When he leaned back he seemed steadier, and more relaxed.  “Ah, I don’t deserve you, Ben.  Or you either, my Athène.  I’m such a wretch, and you’re so very good to me.”

            “We’re here to help you, whether you think you deserve us or not,” said Rose.  “In fact, let’s get you back to bed for a little while, and Ben and I will hold you.  You’re white as a sheet.”  She took his hand while he stood, and then led him to the bedroom. 

            Hannibal ended up lying on his side, his head resting in the hollow of Ben’s shoulder, while Rose lay at his back, her arm thrown over both men.  Hannibal turned and lightly kissed Ben’s chest, then took Rose’s hand and kissed her fingers.  “Thank you,” he whispered.

            “Any time you need us, we’ll be here,” Ben assured him. 

            Hannibal pressed a little closer, and then fell still, quietly dropping off to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Hannibal's quotations:
> 
> I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking.—Shakespeare, Othello
> 
> I can no other answer make but thanks, and thanks; and ever thanks.—Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
> 
> A faithful friend is a strong defense: and he that hath found such an one hath found a treasure. –Ecclesiastes 6:14
> 
> Qui peccat ebrius, luat sobrius.—“He who sins drunk must be punished sober.”
> 
> Morituri te salutant. –“We who are about to die salute you.


End file.
